Many advances have been made with Internet technology since the Internet expanded in the mid to late 1990's. In particular, innovations in web technology have lead to a more robust and user-friendly medium for businesses, organizations and individuals to conduct trade and provide information. In general, the more complex the interface, the more bandwidth required to load the interface to an end-user's computer. Web pages containing complex graphics, photos, video and sound would not have been practical under the slow dial-up configurations that were predominate during the early years of the Internet. As such, emphasis has been placed on solving the challenge of producing eye-catching and interesting interfaces designed to keep the attention of the user, while minimizing the time that the user is required to wait for such an interface to load.
Today, most corporations and organizations are equipped with high-speed Internet connections through dedicated lines such as a T1 line or a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL). An increasing number of households have high-speed broadband Internet connections through cable and satellite, so many of the concerns regarding complex content have significantly diminished. As a result, web site architects, developers and administrators are able to pack more information into each web page. This includes the ability to display multiple secondary web pages within the content of a primary web page. In doing so, web site providers are better able to prevent user from navigating away from a web page to view other information. For example, an investment firm may provide a web page containing information concerning a variety of service offerings. One such service offering may include online buying and selling of stock shares. Therefore, the investment firm may include a frame within its primary web page content which displays stock ticker content from a secondary Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) provides a mechanism for quickly and easily adding a secondary URL frame to a web page. Such a mechanism is the HTML IFrame element which defines an inline frame for the inclusion of external object including other HTML documents. That is, IFrame is preconfigured to enable a web page developer to include an IFrame reference within the HTML of a web page, and to designate the URL that is to be loaded into the IFrame, as the primary web page is being loaded into the user's browser application. However, IFrame lacks the functionality to be dynamically resized based upon the size of the referenced content. To compensate for this, IFrame automatically displays vertical and horizontal scroll bars when the content is larger than the frame area. This enables the user to scroll in order to view areas of the secondary content that are not visible within the boundaries of the IFrame. However, when secondary content also contains scrollbars, the user is presented with a confusing and difficult to use IFrame, in that there are now two sets of vertical and horizontal scrollbars.
Therefore, a need exists for a system and method for displaying secondary web page content within a frame of a primary web page and dynamically determining the size of the secondary content to resize the frame accordingly.